Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Seventh Edition

Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia H. Dayton

Featuring a mix of primary source documents, articles, and illustrations, Women's America: Refocusing the Past has long been an invaluable resource. Now in its seventh edition, the book has been extensively revised and updated to cover recent events in American women's history.

New to this Edition:

33% new selections: Two extended photo essays: "Women in Public" and "Adorning the Body"

New design: provides a clearer distinction between essays, documents, and photo essays

Available for the first time in 2-volume splits: presents more flexibility for two-semester courses

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Seventh Edition

Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia H. Dayton

Description

Featuring a mix of primary source documents, articles, and illustrations, Women's America: Refocusing the Past has long been an invaluable resource. Now in its seventh edition, the book has been extensively revised and updated to cover recent events in American women's history.

Previous publication dates

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Seventh Edition

Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia H. Dayton

Table of Contents

Preface AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Gender and the New Women's HistoryPART I: EARLY AMERICA: 1600-1820Sara Evans, The First American WomenJennifer L. Morgan, "Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder:" European Depictions of Indigenous Women, 1492-1750Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Ways of Her Household DOCUMENT The Law of Domestic Relations: Marriage, Divorce, DowerExamples from Colonial Connecticut Mary Beth Norton, "Searchers again Assembled:" Gender Distinctions in Seventeenth-Century America DOCUMENT The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, 1637"What law have I broken?"Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: The Economic Basis of WitchcraftCarol Berkin, African American Women in Colonial SocietyDOCUMENTS
The Law of Slavery and FreedomVirginia Establishes a Double Standard in Tax Law"According to the condition of the mother . . .""For prevention of that abominable mixture . . ."A Massachusetts Minister's Slave Marriage VowsAnn M. Little, Captivity and Conversion: Daughters of New England in French CanadaCornelia Hughes Dayton, Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England VillageDOCUMENTS Supporting the Revolution"The ladies going about for money exceeded everything . . ."Sarah Osborn, "The bullets would not cheat the gallows . . ."Rachel Wells, "I have Don as much to Carrey on the Warr as maney . . ."Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemings-Jefferson Treaty: Paris, 1789Linda K. Kerber, The Republican
Mother and the Woman Citizen: Contradictions and Choices in Revolutionary AmericaPART II: THE MANY FRONTIERS OF INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA, 1820-1880DOCUMENTS The Testimony of Slave WomenMaria Perkins, "I am quite heartsick . . ."Rose, "Look for some others for to 'plenish de earth"Sharon Block, Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic Jeanne Boydston, The Pastoralization of HouseworkDOCUMENT Working Conditions in Early Factories, 1845"She complained of the hours for labor being too many . . ."Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America James C. Mohr, Abortion in AmericaMaureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish American Nuns in New
York City Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Debating Women's Antislavery PetitionsDOCUMENTS Claiming Rights ISarah and Angelina Grimké: The Connection between Religious Faith, Abolition, and Women's Rights Keziah Kendall, "What I have suffered, I cannot tell you"Photo Essay: Women in Public Gerda Lerner, The Meanings of Seneca Falls, 1848-1998DOCUMENTS Claiming Rights IIDeclaration of Sentiments, 1848 Married Women's Property Acts, New York State, 1848, 1860 DOCUMENT Sojourner Truth's carte de visite Rose Stremlau, "I Know What an Indian Woman can Do:" Sarah Winnemucca Writes about Rape on the Northern Paiute FrontierDrew Gilpin Faust, Enemies in Our Households: Confederate Women and Slavery DOCUMENTS Counterfeit
FreedomA. S. Hitchcock, "Young women particularly flock back & forth . . ."Roda Ann Childs, "I was more dead than alive" Tera W. Hunter, Reconstruction and the Meanings of Freedom DOCUMENTS After the Civil War: Reconsidering the Law Reconstruction Amendments, 1868, 1870 Coger v. The North Western Union Packet Company, Supreme Court of Iowa, 1873 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873 Comstock Act, 1873Minor v. Happersett, 1874 Page Act, 1875Barbara Sicherman, Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text DOCUMENT The Women's Centennial Agenda, 1876Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, "Guaranteed to us and our daughters forever" PART III: CREATING THE STATE IN AN INDUSTRIALIZED NATION: 1880-1945Rebecca Edwards, Pioneers at
the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the WestPatricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells and Southern Horrors DOCUMENTS Claiming an EducationZitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), " . . . this semblance of civilization . . ."Mary McLeod Bethune, "How the Bethune-Cookman College campus started"Peggy Pascoe, Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook Indian Wife: Miscegenation Laws and the Privileges of PropertyGlenda Gilmore, Forging Interracial Links in the Jim Crow SouthJudy Yung, Unbound Feet: From China to San Francisco's ChinatownAnnelise Orleck, From the Russian Pale to Labor Organizing in New York City Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and Women's Activism in the Progressive Era DOCUMENTS Protecting Women Wage-Workers Muller v. Oregon, 1908 Pauline Newman,
"We fought and we bled and we died . . ."Ellen Carol Dubois, The Next Generation of Suffragists: Harriot Stanton Blatch and Grassroots Politics DOCUMENTS Dimensions of Citizenship IMackenzie v. Hare, 1915 Equal Suffrage (Nineteenth) Amendment, 1920 Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1923 Margaret Sanger, "I resolved that women should have knowledge of contraception . . ." Nancy F. Cott, Equal Rights and Economic Roles: The Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emerging Ideal of Slenderness in American Culture Photo Essay: Adorning the Body Vicki L. Ruiz, The Flapper and the Chaperone: Mexican American Teenagers in the SouthwestRuth Schwartz Cowan, The "Industrial Revolution" in the
Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the Twentieth Century Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Reproduction and the Economy in the Great Depression Jacqueline Jones, Harder Times: The Great Depression DOCUMENT Struggling to UnionizeGenora Johnson Dollinger, ". . . Once she understands she is standing in defense of her family--well, God, don't fool around with that woman then"Alice Kessler-Harris, Designing Women and Old Fools: Writing Gender into Social Security LawBlanche Wiesen Cook, Storms on Every Front: Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights at Home and in Europe Valerie Matsumoto, Japanese American Women during World War II BethBailey and David Farber, Prostitutes on Strike: The Women of Hotel Street during World War II Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Sexual Division of Labor during World War II PART IV: STRUGGLES AGAINST INJUSTICE: 1945-2010Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Origins of Feminism in Cold War America Estelle Freedman, Miriam Van Waters and the Burning of Letters Susan K. Cahn, "Mannishness," Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sports Joyce Antler, Imagining Jewish Mothers in the 1950s Amy Swerdlow, Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC Charles Payne, A Woman's War: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement DOCUMENTS Dimensions of Citizenship IIPauli Murray, "I had entered law school preoccupied with
the racial struggle . . . but I graduated an unabashed feminist as well. . . ."Goesaert v. Cleary, 1948Hoyt v. Florida, 1961; Taylor v. Louisiana, 1975 Civil Rights Act, Title VII, 1964 Beth L. Bailey, Prescribing the Pill: The Coming of the Sexual Revolution in America's Heartland Susan J. Douglas, Why the Shirelles Mattered: Girl Groups on the Cusp of a Feminist Awakening Lisa Levenstein, Hard Choices at 1801 Vine: African American Women, Child Support, and Domestic Violence in Postwar PhiladelphiaJane Sherron De Hart, Second-Wave Feminists and the Dynamics of Social ChangeDOCUMENTS Making the Personal PoliticalBetty Friedan, "The problem that has no name . . . I understood first as a woman . . ."Carol Hanisch, "The protest of the Miss
America Pageant". . . told the nation a new feminist movement is afoot. . . ."Redstockings, "Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination."Radicalesbians, "What is a lesbian?"Pat Mainardi, The Politics of HouseworkJennie V. Chavez, "It has taken . . . a long time . . . to realize and speak out about the double oppression of Mexican-American women""Women in the Asian movement find that . . . stereotypes are still hovering over their heads . . . that [they] must play [the] old role[s] in order to get things done"The Combahee River Collective, "We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression"Kay Weiss, "One of the cruelest forms of sexism we live with today is . . . [that] of many doctors"Phyllis Schlafly, "The
thoughts of one who loves life as a woman . . ."DOCUMENTS Dimensions of Citizenship III Equal Rights Amendment, 1972Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973 Roe v. Wade, 1973; Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1992; Carhart v. Gonzales, 2007"We were the first American women sent to live and work in the midst of guerrilla warfare. . . ."Rostker v. Goldberg, 1981 Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson et al., 1986 Violence against Women Act, 1994, 2000, 2005 DOCUMENTS Making Women's StudiesThe Search for the American Woman: Anne Firor Scott's First Women's History Syllabus, University of Washington Summer Session, 1971Founding the Committee for Women's Studies at HarvardUniversity, 1986 Elizabeth L. Hillman, The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force DOCUMENT The Changing WorkplaceSusan Eisenberg, Entering construction . . . was a little like falling in love with someone you weren't supposed to" DOCUMENTS Rethinking MarriageLoving v. Virginia, 1967; Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965; Defense of Marriage Act, 1996; Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 2003 DOCUMENT Embracing Global FeminismHillary Clinton, "Women's Rights Are Human Rights," 1995 Judith Resnik, Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Women's Rights Movements from 1840 through the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century Further Reading and ResourcesFilmsIndex

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Seventh Edition

Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia H. Dayton

Author Information

Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Iowa. She is the author of several books, including No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies (1999) and Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997). She has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jane Sherron De Hart is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Co-author of Sex, Gender, and ERA: A State and the Nation (OUP, 1990), and winner of the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award (1991), she specializes in twentieth-century issues of gender, politics, and policy. She is currently
completing a study of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that blends biography and legal history.

Cornelia Hughes Dayton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. The author of Women Before the Bar (1995), she is currently writing a book about the life stories of those with mental disorders and their caretakers in eighteenth-century America. She recently launched a new website supplementing her essay "Taking the Trade" about a 1740s abortion trial.

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Seventh Edition

Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia H. Dayton

Reviews and Awards

"Brilliantly and evocatively, Kerber, De Hart, and Dayton have once again presented a probing and comprehensive picture of women's experience in America. An indispensable book."--William H. Chafe, Duke University

"Women's America is the ideal text to introduce students to U.S. Women's History. . . . The newest edition features innovative photographic essays to offer guidance for students in interpreting visual primary sources. This is one anthology that really does do it all!"--Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Ohio State University

"The new addition of documentary photographic essays encourages the reader to engage both visual culture and contemporary commentary, bringing women's history to life in relevant ways. Spanning the range of women's experiences across race and class, this impassioned collection is a must-have for teaching and learning women's history."--Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Smith College

"Now in its seventh edition, this long-respected text is a gift to teachers of undergraduate courses in U.S. women's history. . . . It is the perfect instrument for the survey course."--Cynthia Harrison, George Washington University

"This seventh edition of Women's America provides a very good mix of documents, essays, images, and other resources. . . . The selections, which represent some of the finest current and earlier work in the field, are engaging and thought-provoking and should stimulate many discussions and debates and encourage students to do further research."--Maureen Nutting, Seattle Community College